Improved Performance Conversations for Manufacturing Employees

The Challenge

Alliance Laundry Systems incorporated performance and talent management best practices, such as annual performance reviews, goal tracking, and leadership succession planning prior to WorkDove. However, those processes were manual, informal, and largely reliant on various spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks. The greatest challenge for HR leaders was the lack of visibility into overall organizational performance.

The annual performance review historically was completed in Excel and required multiple signatures, printing, and scanning. The final rating of each individual was then placed into a spreadsheet with little to no continuity from the previous years’ performance reviews. Though goal tracking was integrated into the Alliance Laundry culture, no standardized process for creating and monitoring goals was put in place. Managers, therefore, were inconsistent in how they coached direct reports toward goal completion and employees did not take ownership of the goals process. As performance reviews are conducted in Q1 for the previous year, HR leaders found that employees and managers were scrambling to create goals in December in anticipation of the review. Leadership succession has been a component of Alliance Laundry’s talent reviews for years but this aspect was completed in Excel or PowerPoint. This made it difficult for HR to analyze leadership succession, both for the whole organization and for particular functions, because it required reviewing 20+ separate documents.

Ultimately, Alliance Laundry Systems implemented good
performance and talent management processes that were hindered by cumbersome, time-constraining methods. Too much time was spent on manual form completion instead of having productive conversations and driving action.